Southern Hospitality

A good week all round. I think I’ve killed the hex theory. I think I’m good for Geelong and Geelong is good for me.

Brian (second from the right) …

After spending every week at either the MCG or the Phone Dome, it was good to actually get to a ground where it feels like the so called “home” team actually lives there. It’s a dumb thing to say but Geelong feels like it belongs in and to Geelong in a way that none of the teams in the ‘G or at the Phone Dome really do. To add to the sense of being in a real community that really connects to its football team, my host Brian called me as i arrived from home, said he could see the ground out his window and that he’d meet me there in 5 minutes. I get the impression that its a well trodden path from home to Kardinia Park and that their corporate box gets well used week in week out when the team plays at home.

Nope, definitely not the MCG…

To Geelong with Dan and Drew

Our destination, Glorious Geelong…

There is usually nothing too weird about sitting in the back seat of a car while listening to the people in front of you have a conversation but this week it was very, very, very strange. For this week i got away from MCG and the Phone Dome for a change and headed out of mediocre Melbourne to glorious Geelong. Given that they were going anyway to commentate on the game, i managed to grab a lift to Geelong with Drew Morphett and Dan Lonergan from ABC’s sport’s Grandstand commentary team.

Dan and Drew didn’t let on but even before we met we’ve actually been through a lot together. They’ve been my companions on many a rainy winter afternoon, they’ve spent late nights under my pillow (so as not to disturb the girlfriend) calling a gold medal or anchoring a cricket broadcast from South Africa or England or Barbados, and they’re part of the soundtrack to a road trip i did in cricket season a few summers ago through outback Queensland and the Northern Territory. They and their ABC radio colleagues have brought as much triumph and tragedy into my life as anyone I’ve never met.

How weird it was then to be sitting in back seat of a car listening to them both talk. I’ve probably been listening to Drew from the back seat of a car since the day I was old enough to do up my own seat belt. Except that this time he was talking to me, offering up the occasionally libelous bit of off the record gossip and swearing a lot more than i’ve ever heard him do on radio.

Big in Serbia?

Another one of those moments when i realise that I’m wasting my time by attempting to post detailed match responses here. I should stick to the stupid and sensational. My post of yesterday about Essendon winning the Eurovision song contest was the 75th most popular blog post in the world in the last 24 hours according to the good folks at wordpress. I’ll never cease to be amazed at the wonders of the Internet – given i posted it late last night it only existed for 8 of those 24 hours anyway. Actually, given that “Frum Porn” is still one of the most popular search terms that drive people to this site as a result of this post, i probably shouldn’t be that suprised by anything.

Congratulations Essendon!

Serbian Eurovision winner Marija Sheedyvic
sings her stirring anti war power ballad “When the bombers fly up up up, the bombs come down down down”

Let me be the first to congratulate Essendon on their win in the Eurovision song contest. Nice work bombers. Not sure how they’re tracking for the flag this year but a win in a major competition is not to be sneezed at.

Nearly not going to Geelong this week…

Til now, finding someone to go to the games with has been relatively straight forward. But not this week…

Seemed simple enough, someone who follows Geelong calls in, i’ll meet them at the game we’ll drink some beer, sing some songs, yell furious abuse at displaced sandgropers who happen to have made their way to Kardinia Park and celebrate the rousing victory when my team gets up over the competition leaders. Oh no no no. If only it was that easy.

From memory (and hey, i’m not Media Monitors) it went a little something like this:

LINDY: Helen’s (or whatever her name was) called in from Geelong. Helen, you’re a Geelong fan?

CALLER (Possibly Helen): Yes and we don’t want him to come on Sunday.

LINDY: So you’re not calling in to take Marcus then?

CALLER: No, he’s a jinx. Tell him to go and see another team.

Shout Out To The Saints…

If anyone read my comments and reports about The Saints in round 3 you would have noticed the running joke about how difficult the Saints were proving to communicate with. Their fans were telling me to get out while i can, their fan forum at saintsational.com was locking me in a limbo where i was registered but unable to post and the club’s marketing department wanted me to come back a week later. I thought my general tone was one of amusement – if anything, i felt that i’d felt something of the eternal frustration of being a Saints fan.

Seems some of the folks at Saintsational saw it differently decided to get a bit stuck into me yesterday.

When my blog records showed that over a hundred people had visited me from Saintsland yesterday, i thought i’d better get over there and see what they were saying.

Here are some of the better quotes:

“i dont buy into this guy … like its some kinda honour for us for him to be a saints supporter he needs to get over himself … your either a saint or you aint”

“Yeah he’s figured out a great way to get invited to the footy each week for free. Seems like the ABC have fallen for i too putting out announcements each week asking for fans to take him to their game.”

I’ve picked my team…

… in the VFL that is.

Real footy by the bay…

Before everything went wrong at Richmond on Sunday evening i was having a great afternoon. If you listened to the ABC last Friday would have heard that my regular bit got hijacked. A bloke called Trevor Monti, the President of the Williamstown Football Club in the VFL competition called in to try and get me to come and check out some “real footy” last weekend. His Seagulls were taking on the Bombers of Bendigo and he wanted me to check out a bit of it…

Apparently, something similar happened to John Harms (who was also not doing anything about VFL at the time) over at The Age:

A FEW weeks ago, I received a phone call from someone called Trevor Monti. I had never met him before. He was ringing me in his capacity as president of the Williamstown Football Club. He kindly invited me to the lunch before the Seagulls’ opening game of the season against Werribee. He was very friendly.

I am always attracted to a bloke who is free-spirited enough to drop the Kennedy crow call into the opening minutes of his first conversation with you, and by the time I put the phone down, I had made a mental note that he was one of the more creative users of the word in its various forms. So I accepted.

Fortunately Trevor didn’t drop any F-Bombs on the sensitive folks over at ABC radio although he did drop a few after lunch. It looks like Trevor’s on a mission to preach the Willi word and if he needs to commit more hijacks than Al Qaeda to achieve it then so be it.

Testaments from Tigerland?

There are different ways that the fans can react to a stranger intruding on the largest loss in their club’s history.

Obviously at the insane, poorly educated and superstitious end of the spectrum (the Collingwood end?) tens of thousands of them could have grabbed pitchforks and torches and come looking to lynch me deciding that i was a witch or a hex upon their cause. Or you could do what i probably would have done and slinked away sulking – sadly hoping that it was never spoken of again. Or, you could do what Rosy over at Puntroadend.com has done and use this unique coincidence as a bit of a rallying point in difficult times.

Maybe some good will come of last night’s debacle and we might just get a new member out of it. There’s a bloke called Marcus featured on 3LO. He’s been in Melbourne a few years and doesn’t have a team yet. He’s been going to watch a different club each week to try and find a club to devote himself to and this week it was Richmond’s turn to try and win him over.

They had a package of his comments throughout the game on the radio today. Was pretty funny. Rather than put him off he’s considering giving the next 10 weeks of watching clubs a miss and jumping on board the Tigerland Express. He said it was certainly an experience he’ll never forget.

I reckon it’s our duty to try and get him over the line.

OK, so it wasn’t quite a “we will fight them on the beaches” or a Gettysburg address, or even that bit at the end of the Lord of the Rings where a bunch of blokes are standing at the gates of Mordor about to be over-run by 40million Orcs and Aragon tells them that “A day may come when the courage of men fails… but it is not this day” (audio link, go on listen to it Tiger fans!) but for sheer intensity of optimism against suicidal odds, I would think Rosy’s comments deserved to be overly dramatised, filmed and stuck gratuitously into a Hollywood movie.

There may be a day when the courage and self belief of Tigerland fails.. but last Sunday was not that day.

Rosie’s call to arms prompted the biggest flood of testaments for a team that i have yet seen from any team. To read them all, you need to go to Rosie’s web site at Puntroadend.com, but i will include a generous sample of them here – beginning with Rosie herself:

Geelong, i am here to kill your momentum

After watching Sunday night’s tragic loss at the hands of Geelong, I have to apologise to the Richmond fans as I commit the ultimate act of bastardry and switch sides from the exectued to the executioners. This week i am off to Kardinia Park in Geelong to see the devasting Cats take on the unbeaten West Coast Eagles and i’m genuinely hyped for this game. I think it will be a cracker – the team that racked up a cricket score last week take on the team that is generally considered to be the benchmark for this year’s competition.

I must confess that i go to this game with a bit of a prejudice towards Geelong:

Me and the Millers: A circle of pain

Anyone who can remember back all the way to round one might remember Rhys and Kristy, the Roos fans who took me on my first trip to the ‘G on that glorious sunny early autumn afternoon. You may also remember how that game ended in dire tragedy – with Shannon Grant’s inability to kick the winning goal from dead in front (and right in front of me) the only thing that separated me from a life of cursing the fact that i’d picked a team that moved to the Gold Coast.

Well, those who remember the game (or just clicked on the link above) might also remember that Kristy told me that her father had left the Roos after rising all the way through the ranks and taken a job at another football club. Indeed, i believe (and don’t tell anyone because i am not sure how legit this is) i may have even been admitted to ‘G on that first fateful weeked on her father’s pass as a life member of the Roos.

Well, i am pretty sure I saw Kristy’s father last Sunday night in his capacity as the Director of Football at the Tigers.